


A Pinch of Sacred Ashes

by SecretAndroid



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Character Study, Dragon Age: Origins Quest - The Urn of Sacred Ashes, F/M, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Love, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2019-05-17
Packaged: 2020-03-06 16:47:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18855043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecretAndroid/pseuds/SecretAndroid
Summary: After the Warden is knocked unconscious fighting the dragon Andraste while trying to reach the Urn of Sacred Ashes, she wakes up wounded but alive. But for some reason, no one will tell her what happened--not Morrigan, not Leliana, not even Alistair. Some things burn worse than any dragonfire...





	A Pinch of Sacred Ashes

Later, after the first dragon, the one called Andraste, no one will even talk about what happened. Instead, you will lead them limping down the mountainside, Alistair and Morrigan flanking you, and Leliana bringing up the rear, all the way back to camp where the others await. Whenever you try to bring it up, whenever you ask how they killed the dragon without you, Alistair will remark wryly that Morrigan just talked philosophy with it for half an hour, and then it swallowed deathroot of its own volition. Leliana will hum a song under her breath. Morrigan, though, avoids your eyes and rubs her gore-soaked hands together like she'll never get them clean.

In your pocket, you carry a pinch of ash that will cure any ill, but you do not apply it to your own shattered body, nor offer it to your friends. The worst hurt isn't in your bodies at all, and burned women cannot heal the spirit.

#

In your memory, there's a high, warm mountainside after the close, dry press of the cathedral's basement, and the dragon bearing down on you beneath the afternoon sun, the much-worshipped dragon named for a god's dead bride. As she took you between her jaws, you wondered if this was what a god's favor felt like. If holiness was always only rending teeth and ebbing blood and the gnat-spackle of death closing up your vision as the last of you slips from your body.

After that, you were  _ unconscious-dead-dying, _ floating in comfortable nothingness, until the pain returned, then the cold hard stony ground pressing your spine, and finally Morrigan's face swimming against the evening, pinched and worried.

"What's wrong?" you whispered through fire-blistered lips. It hurt to breathe. Talking was worse. "Is everyone okay?"

Morrigan half-closed her eyes. That little slip of fear retreated behind the heavy curtain of her lashes. "It matters not. We shall not speak of it. The dragon is dead, and the others are resting, and that is all that matters."

It is only later that it occurs to you that you were the cause of her worry. That you were the last to sit up, wincing from the broken ribs, the gash in your abdomen, the burns welting every inch of skin not covered by armor.

#

You and Alistair always wake each other up when you have nightmares. They used be about just one dragon, the one waiting in your future, the one that drives the Blight and whispers in your blood. You and Alistair share  _ that _ dragon. It sends you shooting straight awake beside each other, breath heaving, shedding blankets so you sit in sleepless terror, staring into each other's eyes, groping for the weapons laid beside you like sleeping children.

Secretly, you find this nightmare comforting. Perhaps because at the end of it there is always Alistair and a cup of something hot around the campfire. Grey Wardens never dream alone.

But Alistair has other dragon dreams now, ones into which you cannot follow him. He is having that dream tonight. You can read it in the twitching lash of his left arm, the way his hands grope for you in sleep, pressing you ferociously against his skin, a sort of desperate hunger.

Lose someone once, even momentarily, and you'll forever cling to them like oxygen.

"Shh, wake up," you breathe into his ear, roping your hands around his chest, anchoring him until he settles. "It's a dream. I'm here."

He opens his eyes, a faint gleam in the dark of your tent. His pupils dilate, his breathing settles into a ragged rhythm, and he buries his nose into the spiky crop of your hair--what has regrown since the dragon Andraste burned it to stubble.

"Which one was it?" you ask, because there have been so many dragons. They peek out of your past and future like stained glass saints in the Chantry.

His arms tighten, pulling you close, so close and warm you can feel how each breath starts in his stomach and ends in your hair.

"I had that one where I'm making passionate love to Morrigan," he says. "Bleh. Absolutely revolting. I'll need a week's worth of baths just to wash the smell off."

When you smirk despite yourself, his arms tighten a little more, like this is enough to convince him the nightmare is really over.

But he still won't talk about what happened on the mountaintop.

#

You had come in underprepared. You had put too much confidence in your power, how the four of you fell into an easy familiar rhythm on the battlefield, your sword and dagger, Alistair's shield, Leliana's arrows raining down from a ledge, and Morrigan working the weather, shaking loose ice and lightning, forming it into spears or deadly dancing fingers.

Your own arrogance nearly destroyed you. The way you'd cracked a joke, said you'd be back at camp by supper with dragon steaks for the whole company. Leliana and Morrigan argued about recipes. Leliana wanted to do a roast, but Morrigan preferred a thick rich stew dotted with tiny wild onion bulbs.

Only Alistair, perhaps, sensed the real danger. You recognized his bright grin, that ebullience he wore like armor against his own dark moods. He asked if you wouldn't consider a career in nug-wranging instead. He kissed you and slipped you a bottle of fire balm. You didn't want to use the stuff. It reeked of elfroot and spindleweed, and it stayed in your hair for weeks, and besides it itched. But while you complained, Alistair uncorked the bottle and dumped it on your hair with an innocent, "Whoops!"

After that, it was easier to just rub the stuff in than to clean it off. Turns out it saved your life.

You could search all of Thedas and never find another Alistair. He never disputed your right to fight things head on--who would dare?--but he always shouldered his shield in a way that included you, that suggested you always had a place there, a shelter, if you needed it.

You were the one who rang the summoning gong, and like a good hostess, Andraste didn't keep you waiting. You recall great silver wings against the sky that cut swaths from the cloud tops. You remember how the slab of rock beneath you shuddered and shifted when she landed.  _ Six _ , You thought.  _ She has six claws. _ That fact surprised you for some reason. Everything slows down in the moments before you meet your foe. Enough time to record every last detail of each other. How else will the survivor memorialize the other afterward?

How else will you replay it accurately in your nightmares?

Six claws on each foot. Scales iridescent as pearls, each the size of your hand, getting smaller up her neck, plate mail to scale mail to the fine chainlinks of her snout, curling into the most delicate work around her nostrils, where the sulfur trailed out in twin wisps. And then all at once, your own body registering again, the strong elastic heft of your sword, the quick spin of your dagger, a sudden lightness as Leliana began to sing.

And then the blur, the dragon's darting neck. Fire exploded across your vision, blocking out the sky and the ridge and even the silvery gleam of Alistair just behind you. You ran up her lowered neck and hacked at the tender scales on her brow, but then something went wrong. A misplaced foot, maybe slipping on the gore flowing out from her wound, but you were falling, and then with a flick, caught in her jaws.

Your splintmail could only stave off so much pressure. You tried to take in air, but your lungs wouldn't expand against the pressure.

You remember sulfur. Sudden fire. You remember thinking, "This is what it feels like just before they build a temple to your ashes. This is what holiness feels like."

And then nothing. Nothing at all until later, when it was all over, and you blinked up at Morrigan's face bent over you, creased with shocking tenderness. Your body came alive again with your mind. You gritted your teeth against the screams. Burns, broken bones, crushed organs. Morrigan's magic already working through your body, tugging sinews back into alignment, knitting new flesh. The agonizing work of healing.

Morrigan nodded grimly and turned back to her other patients. Leliana and Alistair lay groaning and broken beside you, too.

#

The thing about Alistair is that he has never been happier than since he became a Grey Warden. Anyone else would mourn the very idea that a life could be so hard that the Joining would seem a paradise by comparison, but Alistair doesn't ask for pity.

"I don't understand you at all," you say to him at breakfast. You stir a huge pot of porridge while he feeds twigs to the fire. Last night, the darkspawn dreams had been especially bad, but now he sits in the sunlight, laughing at the antics of squirrels. "How do you keep so cheerful when there's a dragon to slay?" You mean the archdemon, of course.

"Easy. The way I see it, there will always be another dragon," said Alistair. "You kill one, they'll just dig up another and send you after it next. If you spend your life worrying about the next one, you'll never be through with it. But there might not always be squirrels, or bacon, or sleeping in with pretty women." The last bit makes him blush all the way to the ears. "So sleep in. Eat your bacon. Leave the dragons where they belong, in yesterday and tomorrow. And wear your fire salve, my dear. It gives you a certain… glow."

"It's called a rash, Alistair," you tell him, but he has teased a smile out of you despite yourself.

He is everything you wish you were. He is unencumbered by the weight of past and future, and you love him for it. You run like a person who has forgotten she can walk, hummingbird-like, flitting from task to task, unable to rest. He sits down in a field, peels grass stems down to their sweet inner cores and nibbles on them, enjoying the moment.

But he still won't tell you about the mountainside.

#

Later, it will be Leliana who will tell you what happened. She will speak of it lightly but intricately, like complicated knots on fine Orlesian slippers.

"That boy loves you, you know," she says, jerking her chin at Alistair, who is helping Sten rinse darkspawn guts off of the war-hound.

You have tried to be careful with Alistair, slipping off to your tent together only when you thought no one would see. You shouldn't have trusted Zevran to keep a secret like this.

"Alistair and I are just close friends," you say delicately, but Leliana isn't buying it.

She folds her arms across her chest. "No. It is more than a tumble in the bedroll. It was written all over him, on the mountaintop. He went berserk when he saw you fall into the dragon's jaws."

"Oh?" you say, because no one talks about that day, as if by some tacit agreement they'd all decided it was better that you didn't know. You incline your head, trying to project curiosity rather than eagerness. Alistair slops a bucket of water over the war-hound. The dog shakes its coat, spraying Sten in diluted gore. Sten glares and mutters about knowing your place according to the Qun. Alistair laughs, loud and long and free. You've never seen him bloodthirsty. You can't even imagine it. Not even Duncan's death could do that to him.

"He leapt over your body like a maleficar drunk on demon magic," Leliana continues, and from the squint of her eyes you can tell she is watching for your reaction too, "and when he'd hacked open a gouge in the dragon's flank, it took him down. He crawled through the blood and fire toward your body, you know. I think he wanted to die with you."

"But I wasn't dead," you protest. It is hard to see yourself through her eyes, prone, ambiguous, both comrade and corpse. It is hard to imagine Alistair wanting to die.

"We didn't know," said Leliana. "The way it gripped you, shook you around… how it tossed you on the stone, and you lay there unmoving. We would have retrieved the Sacred Ashes for you, except I went down next, after Alistair. I don't know how Morrigan managed it."

So it had been Morrigan. Morrigan had saved you all in the end, each of you leaping after the next, sacrifice on sacrifice on sacrifice.

A memory returns, cold and clear and distant. How after Morrigan's potions had knit together your bodies, you'd all drawn close together, the four of you. You were covered in each other's blood. Alistair had you clasped so tight it hurt to breathe. The tender new skin covering some of your wounds broke open from the pressure, but you didn't care. None of you cared. You all needed to feel each other breathing, just for a moment.

#

Morrigan keeps her own counsel on the furthest edge of camp, at the outer limits of what could be defined as part of your company at all. She is a woman uncomfortable with too much eye contact, easily startled by human voices, but at peace when wolves howl. She smells of earth and smoke and blood magic.

You squat down beside her cooking pot, where she is brewing something slick and acrid. Morrigan flashes you a tight smile. "Warden?" she says. It is both greeting and question.

"I want to talk about what happened on the mountainside," you say. "Leliana told me what happened. You could have left when the dragon struck us down. You could have gone back into the woods instead of risking yourself. No one would have blamed you. No one can fight a dragon on their own."

Morrigan stirs the pot. She touches a fingertip to a spatter-mark on the iron lip and rubs it against her thumb. "The dragon was named Andraste," she says at last. "A poor omen for her. It was her fate to burn. Not yours."

"You don't even believe in Andraste," you observe wryly.

"Precisely," says Morrigan. "We have enough shrines to women burned alive for meaningless causes, don't you think?"

You think, perhaps, that you agree with her. You think, perhaps, that you understand. That it is not always noble to go to the martyr's stake. That sometimes, it is enough to live, and tell the tale. Morrigan is what a woman looks like when she is unburnt.

"Thank you," you say to her. "I owe you my life."

"The fox does not need to thank the bear when it releases her from the hunter's trap," says Morrigan.

You seize her elbow so she has to look you directly in the eye. You want her to know you mean the words. "Morrigan," you say, "you are a true friend. You didn't want me to die. Just admit it."

Morrigan's lashes flutter, and her lip twitches a little. Suddenly she stoops over the pot again, ladles some of her new potion into a bottle, and corks it.

You give her a questioning look.

"Stamina potion," she says with a sly, knowing smile. "A gift for… a friend."

That night, you take Alistair's hand and lead him back to your tent without any pretense or subterfuge, right in front of your company, with the frankness that follows in the wake of every battle.

#

There are ashes in your pocket that can cure any ill, because burned women make the best medicine, because what is holy is that which has been utterly destroyed, because the journey was the point, the suffering was the point, the dragon was the point. Or rather, the days around the dragon were the point, tucked in the margins like bookmarks placed and forgotten as the story ran on.

It is the reason Alistair is happier than he's ever been in his life, and this fact holds no bitterness for him. For having finally found love, he has realized it won't last forever, that happiness is only ever present tense, and that you have to hold each other  _ now _ , in the present, before the next dragon comes, before war and thrones and blood and duty extort it from you, before your dragon comes for you in the end. 

Holiness is to be set apart, taken apart, torn apart, and so you cling together and refuse to be ash.

That night, when his nightmares come, you stop his silent screams with a hot kiss, pushing breath back into him until he gasps awake. You hold him down with your body and breath. You straddle his thighs. He works the buckles of your leather jerkin free, and you slide your hands down, down, down.

Alistair's scars form a map of his happiness, a patchwork of todays held together by yesterdays. You follow that map. You nibble his leg gently, the dragonstooth scar, the harsh marks of templar training, the fine net of accumulated hurts from soldiers and darkspawn and absent fathers. He kisses the faded burn mark on your neck. You do what you have learned together, you breathe together, you join together, you find your destination, and eventually you sleep.

This time, your dreams are better.

There will be other battles someday, and Morrigan will not always be there to save you from them.

But it is not yet someday. It is today, and no dragon lives here.

**Author's Note:**

> During my first Dragon Age: Origins playthrough, my Warden actually died at the start of the dragon Andraste fight, and each of my party members leapt forward over her body to save her. Afterwards, when Morrigan won the fight at the last possible second, everyone resurrected and...never spoke of it again. I was so struck by this following a really harrowing, close fight, that I had to write the story of why exactly that was.


End file.
